Wine 1.4 Released

vinn writes "Wine 1.4 was released today and includes support for a wide range of applications, including Office 2010. There are some major architectural changes, including a built-in DIB engine for better graphics display and a new audio stack designed around the newer Vista / Win 7 system and integrated into the native audio system. Almost every other subsystem received substantial updates, including Direct3D, the Gecko-based web browsing components, and better internationalization. The release notes contain more detail and you can download the source code now, or wait for packages to appear soon."

Comments

First Wine Post

[GameboyRMH]

Full bodied with a distinct Windowsy flavor.

Re:First Wine Post

[Nutria]

But I don't want to have my throat sliced up by broken glass!

Wah, wah! Baby wants a Zima!

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

What's wrong with Win 7? While I can't stand Metro, thought Vista was too damned buggy, and hated the Fisher Price UI of WinXP I'd have to say I find Win 7 to be VERY nice, right up there with my beloved XP X64 and Win2K. How we lived without breadcrumbs and jumplists is beyond me, going back to any previous version now feels like going back to Win9x as losing those features really sucks.

Speaking of Win9X are they still working on a Windows version? I heard rumors a couple of years back and the one thing I miss about XP was its great Win9X support for old games. How good is Wine on its DirectX 6/7/8 support? Can it run the more PITA games like Mechwarrior 3 and i76? I really miss those games but I always end up with the "jumping bug" on MW3 and i76 has some serious timing issues if you aren't running a single core or running below 2GHz. Has anyone cooked up a "Wine in a box" LiveCD for gaming so one doesn't have to install a whole OS just to run it? How good is its hardware acceleration? I haven't had a chance to run it since I sold my dual boot XP/Xandros laptop in 09 so I'm a little behind here. Is its support for the older stuff better than XP?

Re:First Wine Post

[Tyrannosaur]

What's wrong with Win 7?

It can't run on Linux

Re:First Wine Post

[Tyrannosaur]

EDIT: It can't run on *my* Linux. I'm still on a Pentium 4 :'(

Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[G3ckoG33k]

Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 - http://www.winehq.org/download/debian

Still, thank you all for the fantastic project called Wine!

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[impaledsunset]

Debian hasn't packaged 1.2 yet, these are third-party packages.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=585409

Apparently one of the issues why the newer versions can't be packaged is that the maintainer wants to package and upload all versions between the last one and 1.4 in order. Since nobody has the time to do so, there isn't any progress towards packaging the newer ones.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[CubicleZombie]

Indeed - although it has to be said that wine is particularly easy to build from source, even for ubunt^M^M not-so-savy tech users :-)

I've been using Linux for 14 years, professionally for 12, and I now refuse to build anything from source. It was fun at the beginning, but now I need things to just work.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed - although it has to be said that wine is particularly easy to build from source, even for ubunt^M^M not-so-savy tech users :-)

I've been using Linux for 14 years, professionally for 12, and I now refuse to build anything from source. It was fun at the beginning, but now I need things to just work.

Oddly enough "needing things to work" is why I compile something from source on an almost daily basis... If you are going to be working anywhere even within walking distance of the bleeding edge you will be needing (and possibly developing) the latest tools and drivers. You will not find them in the "stable" binary repository.

Blast from the past

[Picass0]

It's truthfully been ages since I've thought about Wine.

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

Re:Blast from the past

[Cornwallis]

i've been using it within Fedora and Mint with Office 2003 and Photoshop (and previously with Dreamweaver) and had no problems. I would say my experience is that the applications have been running faster than under Virtualbox - which I do use for testing builds on a fairly regular basis. YMMV.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Those need a Windows license. Wine doesn't.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

That's a little like asking how the Toyota Prius stacks up against a Boeing 727. While technically both are able to get you from Boston to New York, they have completely different use cases.

Virtual machine servers are intended to run an entire alternate operating system (under which you can run whatever applications you want). Wine, on the other hand, is intended to allow you to run Windows programs *without having Windows at all*.

Re:Blast from the past

[Geeky]

Same here. When I used Linux regularly I eventually switched to VMWare for running Windows, as Wine didn't really cut it (probably talking about ten years ago, though...).

Eventually I realised that I was spending 90% of my time using either a web browser or a Windows applications (Photoshop and Lightroom) and I might as well run Windows on the bare metal. With tools like Cygwin and LAMP I have most of what I'd miss from Linux, so I guess I've done it the other way round; made Windows more like Linux rather than Linux more like Windows.

Re:Blast from the past

[Blaskowicz]

you get working 3D acceleration. never got that to run under Virtualbox even though you only have to check a box, and somehow other people have it working. your I/O is not slow and CPU hungry it seems. but compatibility is still hit or miss - I'm talking about games mainly. my wine 1.3.28 just crapped at running return to castle wolfenstein and even with warcraft III I have stuttering sound. but I should update my 1.3 via ppa.

my great plan is to switch to IOMMU virtualisation, running presumably Xen. a physical graphics card will be passed-thru to a windows gaming-only VM. but I need new hardware (an asrock mobo with 970 chipset, I will go from 2GB ddr2 to 8GB ddr3). I also fear that it may be a pain in the ass and ill supported, and needing a VGA switch or a KVM.

Re:Blast from the past

[Creepy]

VirtualBox and VMware emulators are a type called pass-through emulation, which actually only emulates a small amount of functionality of the system (mainly drivers) and the rest is all native, so the performance hit is generally trivial. At most you should see about a 20% hit in CPU here (as long as you aren't memory bound - WINE shouldn't chew up as much memory as a VM, generally). If the GPU is hardware accelerated and properly passed through, there should be almost no hit unless the drivers for that platform are particularly bad.

WINE is a native implementation of the Windows APIs, so if an API isn't implemented, it crashes and burns. Also it actually has the same problem as VMs in regards to devices - they need to be implemented or they won't work and in the case of WINE, very few are. OTOH, WINE can use all graphics memory if used with DX or OpenGL and most VMs share an amount of it (VirtualBox I think is up to 256M now, but my card has 1GB). Likewise emulators usually are assigned some of your CPUs and WINE can use all of them.

  When I have VirtualBox properly set up, I get two frames less in Linux running in the emulator than I did in native Windows, so I suspect your VM isn't running with hardware accelerated drivers. With VirtualBox you also need to turn off the native mouse pointer to use OpenGL with hardware acceleration or you spin like crazy (or it will start driving for you in 2D), so if you have the native pointer on and aren't spinning, you aren't in native OpenGL, which requires installing the VirtualBox extensions and the native hardware driver. If your hardware acceleration was properly set up, how much video memory did the OpenGL program consume?

Great, sometimes

[brunes69]

When Wine works well, it is far superior to running the app in a VM, for a number of reasons

- Performance - When an app runs well under Wine, it runs as fast as it does under Windows on the same machine, or sometimes it runs even faster. Running under a VM is never as fast as running native on the same hardware.

- Desktop integration - When an app is installed under Wine, it automatically integrates with your GNOME/KDE desktop... the application is available in the menu, same window manager, etc. Yes there are solutions for this under VMs like VMWare Fusion, but it is not as clean and frankly usually is buggy as all get out.

When an app runs in Wine well, I prefer to run it that way over a VM. VMs are much better though to be sure the app is running the exact way it was meant to run.

Wine is $200 cheaper

[tepples]

With fast machines, loads of ram and virtual machines I am not sure what the point of wine is anymore.

You still to buy a $200 copy of retail Windows for the Mac or home-built desktop PC on which you run Windows inside a virtual machine. Xubuntu + Wine is cheaper than Windows, and Mac OS X + Wine is cheaper than Mac OS X + Windows.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[Urza9814]

It depends on what you're doing with it. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows (NOT in a VM.) And something like WoW in a virtual machine? Not gonna happen. For office apps and such, a VM will probably work fine, but for any kind of gaming, I've even found noticable lag on a 2.5GHz quad-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM running a game made for Windows 98. Wine just performs better. Plus with a VM you run into issues with keyboard/mouse capture -- you don't want to accidentally hit the capture key in the middle of a WoW raid. Or if you're using host integration so there is no capture key, sometimes the mouse won't capture right and you'll run it right through the edge of the screen or something...

I haven't used Wine in a while; I'm mostly using VMs because what I need these things for now is testing apps in various environments, which Wine can't really do -- but with all the problems I've had with VMs (mostly VirtualBox, some VMWare), I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever choose to use a VM when Wine would do the job.

Which apps?

[unixisc]

Better question I can think of - which Windows apps does one want to run under Linux/BSD? Office? IE? Chrysis? I checked out 2 versions of Minesweeper - one under Wine, and one native in Linux. Preferred the native one. Of course, if I prefer Office 2003 to Calligra Suite (I still find Office 2007 a pain to work w/), I might prefer Wine. Maybe QuickBooks could use Wine? That's one of the few apps I can think of that doesn't have a good replacement in Linux.

But honestly, I think a lot of apps could use a WABI like approach. In the past, they suffered, but the main reason for that was that WABI was about running Wintel binaries on RISC based Unixstations, such as Suns, HP-9000s, RS/6000 workstations and so on. But heck, NT on RISC itself couldn't run Wintel binaries, so it's no surprise that these platforms did worse. But w/ any Intel based Unix - be it Linux, BSD or whatever, that should not be an issue. If I'm working in an X based desktop, such as KDE or GNOME or something similar, I don't expect my applications to look like Windows to the point that even the Window menus and everything have to be identical: a KDE or GNOME look & feel is okay.

I think a better goal would be that instead of targetting Office 2010, which like 2007 is a new UI - ribbons & everything, make the native Linux Offices - LibreOffice, Calligra Suite, et al as similar to Office 2003 as possible, and promote that to users. I had been a long time Office 2003 user, and I find 2007 tough to navigate, despite being so fluent w/ its predecessor. And I'm not a typical lay user. So if the new Office suites were to target 2003 and win over their users, a lot would have been achieved. Similarly, use Wine for things like QuickBooks, while in the meantime, hopefully, add something in the KDE Office apps suite to work w/ it, and hopefully make some arrangements w/ banks to support it.

I have no suggestions about the games. Only thing I think would be good - something like Windows Movie Maker - dunno whether OpenShot video editor fits the bill. Cinerella and Avidemux are way too complicated.

I do hope that ReactOS matures soon, so that by the time MS has cleaned up its act on Windows 8, ReactOS is a good enough replacement for both XP and 7.

Re:Which apps?

[LordLucless]

The following are the apps that I run under Wine (just to give you an idea):
- World of Warcraft
- Audible
- Goldwave Pro (to un-DRM the Audible files)
My wife also uses some website's proprietary software to assemble photo albums, which are then uploaded, printed, bound, and shipped to her.

Code sharing

[DrYak]

The ReactOS and the Wine project share a lot of code (most of the userspace libraries. Consider ReactOS as a Wine userland + WinNT-like kernel). So therefore, the day ReactOS is actually a complete OS that can run 100% of windows software, is also the day that Wine can run all the Windows software too.